You can clearly see that it splashed down about a minute earlier than their estimate in the following video. They quickly took the time down and never mentioned it again... A minute's worth of miscalculation at 1000km/s could be a big fast mistake.

The chute opened basically exactly on schedule. That's where you go from precise de-orbit calculations to dealing with localized weather. The chute was open for about 5 minutes, travel speed was about 12 mph with the chutes open. If they had expected a 2-3 mph updraft but didn't get one, then that explains the water landing being a minute or so early. Really no concern here.

Video is fascinating. Appears to be analog video. Amazing that they can track the thing well enough to catch it on video with high-power lenses (if you've ever tried to manually track anything with high power lenses, you get a sense of how difficult it is, so probably must be automated tracking), and yet... the recording equipment apparently is not state of the art.

On July 21, 1961, Grissom was pilot of the second Project Mercury flight, Mercury-Redstone 4, popularly known as Liberty Bell 7. This was a suborbital flight which lasted 15 minutes and 37 seconds. After splashdown, emergency explosive bolts unexpectedly fired and blew the hatch off, causing water to flood into the spacecraft. Quickly exiting through the open hatch and into the ocean, Grissom was nearly drowned as water began filling his spacesuit. A nearby helicopter tried to lift and recover the spacecraft, but the flooding spacecraft became too heavy, and it was ultimately cut loose before sinking.

Grissom asserted he had done nothing to cause the hatch to blow, and NASA officials eventually concluded that he was correct. Initiating the explosive egress system required hitting a metal trigger with the side of a closed fist, which unavoidably left a large, obvious bruise on the astronaut's hand,[citation needed] but Grissom was found not to have any of the tell-tale bruising. Still, controversy remained, and fellow Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra, at the end of his October 3, 1962 flight, remained inside his spacecraft until it was safely aboard the recovery ship, and made a point of deliberately blowing the hatch to get out, bruising his hand.[26]

I hope the hell they don't - there's plenty of useful work to be done in LEO yet. (Even though it doesn't give space fanbois any wood.)

I hope to hell they do -- by doing all the useful work in LEO that will enable it, like orbital refueling depots or even shipyards. Getting to LEO is what needs to be handed off.

If we can make access to LEO routine and cheap (relatively speaking), and allow NASA to develop LEO capabilities instead of wasting all their money on pork launchers so they can start their missions from components launched to LEO on commodity rockets, then we can make getting to the Moon trivial, and Mars easy enough that it's conceivable to do without stopping all other NASA work.

Same thing though - let them focus on things that no-one else can do just as efficiently but cheaper. In other words, the non-commercially-viable stuff. That's the kind of thing government projects are for.

The only problem is that Congress is more likely to just cut NASA budget on the grounds that they can now save by using SpaceX...

Obviously no astronauts have gone beyond low-Earth orbit, nor have been in space for any length of time to figure out how to survive in space beyond a couple of days. I'm glad to see that mankind is condemned to live upon this poor excuse of a rock called Earth.

Yes, I was being sarcastic. There have been spaceflights to Mir and the ISS which have lasted longer than it would take for Hohmann transfer orbit trip to Mars, both directions. Indeed that was one of the specific goals of the Skylab missions, at least to document what might happen to astronauts if they were in a microgravity situation for the duration of one-way trip to Mars but with the capability of returning to the Earth quickly (since they were in LEO) if there was some sort of problem they discovere

I'm glad to see that mankind is condemned to live upon this poor excuse of a rock called Earth.

A new life awaits you in the offworld colonies! All the dry vacuum you can suck, and all the nickel-iron ore you can chew. Plus a bonus daily bath of fresh, invigorating ionising radiation. It's all yours for a low, low, price of $500 million (one way) per passenger. Send us your starving, huddled masses yearning to breathe through a dirty CO2 scrubber and drink urine recyc. I lift my lamp beside the golden pressure hatch.

(Lamp may be extinguished if fuel cell main bus voltage is low. Pressure hatch may ve

I'm fairly sure you're being sarcastic, but let's work with your scenario.First off SpaceX have said they think they can get it down to about $1million per 1 way trip.Other than that your post seems to be pretty spot on about what we can expect from early colonisation. Except two things:1) There are resources out there to be had, maybe not on planets but if for example you're mining/building the solar arrays that power most of Earth then there's serious money to be made up there. The fewer people are up the

Elon Musk's primary goal in founding SpaceX is to go to Mars and I would give him as good a chance of acheiving it as anyone.

The shuttle being decommisioned improves the odds of going to Mars, not reduces them. It was a money sink and it promoted the mind set of being stuck in LEO because it was stuck in LEO. It had also acquired so many restrictions for safety issues it was barely doing its vastly reduced mission. It had turned in to a pork barrell project to make jobs at NASA, Boeing and Lockheed, not do anything worthwhile in space (outside of servicing Hubble).

Intelsat [spacex.com] signed the first commercial contract for Falcon Heavy yesterday and if SpaceX can successfully build and launch those, and even better recover and reuse them, they will be a far more valuable tool in leaving LEO and going to Mars than Shuttle every would be.

I personally dont think bone loss and eyesight are going to be show stopping issue for Mars. Radiation exposure in deep space and on the surface of Mars is the serious issue unless you can get a ship with enough shielding and propulsion to move the shielding.

Me personally and I'm sure lots of others would volunteer for a Mars mission even if it was a one way mission and life shortening. To me the ideal mission to Mars is a one way trip with a permenent stay, and a logistics train to support a permenent colony. The zero G issues are more a problem returning to 1G and earth than they would be staying in 1/3 G on Mars which isn't as bad as zero G. A one way trip also saves a long return trip in zero G to get back to Earth. Even if zero G is a problem you can build a larger ship and spin it enough to get 1/3 G. That is an engineering challenge, not a show stopping issue.

Even if zero G is a problem you can build a larger ship and spin it enough to get 1/3 G.

You don't have to build a larger ship. You can just swing a counterweight on a long tether and get centrifugal gravity that way. The counterweight can be the spent 2nd stage from your launch vehicle, or an external pod containing the fuel for your return trip, or drinking water, or... ?

Actually, Falcon Heavy is important because at 53 tons into low Earth orbit (LEO) payload capacity, that's enough to launch components of a spaceship using _nuclear_ propulsion. And that means with nuclear rockets, instead of nine-month transit time to Mars, we maybe talking as little as 45 days!:-) With that short transit time, the need for consumables and radiation protection will be lower, substantially lightening the weight of the spacecraft going to Mars. And it could means it'll even be cheaper to ev

The SpaceX Grasshopper project is about putting landing thrusters on all of the stages, so the whole rocket can be reused up to 1000 times. Launch a payload, rocket stages return to launchsite. Re-condition and refuel for about 50 grand, launch again. Repeat until the satellite ring helps to reduce insolation.

If you actually want to go to Mars and beyond you need to fix that to:

Let's see NASA funnel money and contracts to help SpaceX build a reusable Falcon Heavy, long duration crew modules to attach to Dragon, etc.

NASA, Lockheed and Boeing, in their current form, simply aren't going to succeed in bending metal, building new launchers or probably designing anything usable. I think its open to debate if they have the fire in their belly necessary to do anything hard. As long as they get paid even when they fai

Traitors is a bit harsh. Actually, uncalled for. That said, it's really bizarre that so many Republicans in Congress keep trying to kill private enterprise in favor of a statist space program. The hypocrisy, it burns. On the other hand, once private enterprise starts becoming really successful at opening space, I expect this to reverse, with GOP pushing private space and the Dems trying to tax and regulate it to death. Both parties suck.

It is hypocrisy but the aerospace companies that have dominated U.S. space access are also defense contractors and the Republican's are completely in thrall to defense contractors. Lockheed and Boeing help run the Republican party alongside big banks, big pharma and big fossil fuels.

The American manned space program hasn't been about space exploration since Apollo ended. Its been about creating contracts for Lockheed and Boeing and creating jobs in the states of powerful Senators like Hatch in Utah, Shelby in Alabama, Hutchinson in Texas and Nelson in Florida(he is a Democrat).

You can tell Lockheed has bought out Congress and the DOD because they've received back to back gigantic contracts for fighter jets both of which are staggeringly expensive and neither of which work, the F-22 and the F-35. The U.S. is currently committed to spending over $1 trillion we don't have on F-35's which have proven to be deeply flawed and are entering production without even being half way through flight test. F-22's have such serious oxygen system issues pilots are refusing to fly them and have never been used in combat. When a pilot blacked out and crashed an F-22, the DOD and Lockheed somehow managed to blame the pilot even when they new the Oxygen system was failing which shows how morally contemptible they are.

Most explorers explored to serve the interests of regular commerce like "truckers", but they weren't carrying cargo to a already-known place by an established route through previously explored territority. Or, at least, when they did that, it wasn't called "exploration", even if they did that as well as exploration.

Truckers is just what we need. In order for space exploration to be successful we need boring, easily repeated, safe access to LOE. If they can make LOE boring and trucker like then we have a much better chance of getting past LOE. Until then every flight into space beyond earth will have weight and power constraints placed on it be the launch vehicle. Once shipping to LOE is easy and cheap we can build ships that are no longer constrained by the need to be completely contained in the payload compartment of the launch vehicle.

Exploration is best done by probes. Figuring out how to sustain humans in space is best done by short-range manned missions.

The two are different. There being no urgency to put meat in space before developing the machines which will be required (forever) for man to interact with the completely hostile environment of space, send robots first. We need those on Terra too.

This would separate exploration from entertainment while letting "tourists" buy the ride of their d

In digging around various information sources on Dragon, I noticed something odd: It appears in this [wikipedia.org]photo that the capsule is equipped with standard red/green navigation lights [wikipedia.org]. Are these actual nav lights? Are they an FAA requirement?

Frequently, there is a combined red/green light [gstatic.com] on the bow of a ship. The way it works is this [sailcorp.com.au]: Looking down on the boat and imagining a clock face with the 12 at the front of the boat, from 12 o'clock to (roughly) 4 o'clock would be green. 4 o'clock to (roughly) 8 o'clock would be white, and 8 o'clock to 12 o'clock would be red. Except 8 and 4 are 120 degrees from 12, but the red and green lights only shine through a horizontal angle of 112.5 degrees. The white stern light covers 135 degrees.

I'm not sure about the navigation lights themselves, but Dragon did have a strobe light that the ISS crew could turn on and off. It served the dual purpose of allowing them to find the craft, and it acted as a confirmation that the Dragon was receiving and processing commands from the ISS.

I originally thought the spatial separation for the red and green isn't very high (just either side of the solar panel on one side of the dragon trunk) which makes it only visible from one orientation so it's not very useful at all, but if you assume they are only using it for docking with people in control having it be something common is a good idea to save brainspace...

I read your post and immediately thought "How did he link to the Wikipedia article and not see where it mentions piloted spacecraft?" only to find out someone deleted all references to spacecraft in January with no explanation.

and piloted spacecraft, a red light will be mounted on the left or port side of the craft and a green on the right or starboard side. These help two craft in a situation in which their paths cross determine who has right-of-way.

Think they have enough time at orbital speeds to visually determine who has the right of way and act on it?

There was a sci-fi writer/director who pointed this out (in one of his own movies). Two spacecraft were passing at a 'leisurely' rate, such that the occupants of one could watch the other pass and take note of its configuration/markings out their window (porthole). In reality, interplanetary travel would dictate that, unless you want to spend a few lifetimes getting anywhere, the whole experience woul

Think they have enough time at orbital speeds to visually determine who has the right of way and act on it?

If there is enough time for a sluggish, human operated, mechanical arm to leisurely reach out and grab the spacecraft, then I'd say there's enough time to look out of a port and visually determine by the navigation lights whether the craft is in the right orientation. Orbital speeds don't mean squat if the two spacecraft are in roughly the same orbit. Besides, maybe the navigation lights are not about what's happening in space. Maybe they're about what's happening when the craft is bobbing around in the

Think they have enough time at orbital speeds to visually determine who has the right of way and act on it?

Oh I thought the same thing when I first read the wikipedia article years ago. But if there's one thing I've learned in four years of working with the FAA, rules often aren't based on reality, much less sense...

Or it could be an orientation thing. Red and green lights allow you to tell at a glance which way vessel is travelling (usually for towards or away).

And nav lights on boats/aircraft serve much the same purpose. At a distance, you can tell which way the vessel is traveling, if its moving (not an issue for air/spacecraft of course) and something about its size and type. Although the needs would be somewhat different, it would make sense to use configurations already familiar to pilots on spacecraft.

when entering the capsule, you must declare "you have offended my family, and you have offended the shaolin temple" . It would be really great if the inside of the caspsule was lined in prisms and mirrors

Had to be the video of the astronauts opening up the space capsule with the required safety goggles and masks. If something failed and an astronaut got sucked into space I am sure his final words would have been "The goggles, they do nothing...".

Its great to see private enterprise enter the space race now, maybe NASA will stop billing $20k for a toilet seat and $30k for a hammer because SpaceX can get them at Walmart for $5 a piece.

They wouldn't get sucked anywhere unless there was an explosive failure of the pressurized shell that would break it apart. A hole/crack may suck all the air out, but it won't suck you out unless you put yourself right against it, and even then it must be big enough to generate sufficient shears to break apart your tissues.

Had to be the video of the astronauts opening up the space capsule with the required safety goggles and masks.

In microgravity, loose things float around. If something sharp came loose inside the Dragon, you don't want it to get in your eye. In an environment that's been entirely sealed for days, material outgassing or particulate breakdown can cause hazards which wouldn't be a problem on Earth because air movement would carry it away. So goggles and masks make sense.

Its great to see private enterprise enter the space race now, maybe NASA will stop billing $20k for a toilet seat and $30k for a hammer because SpaceX can get them at Walmart for $5 a piece.

Which is fine until the toxic outgassing from your $5 Chinese toilet seat poisons the atmosphere over the next month and kills the crew.

One of the reasons space is legitimately expensive is because many things become complex when you don't have any gravity and are living in a sealed environment.

Its great to see private enterprise enter the space race now, maybe NASA will stop billing $20k for a toilet seat and $30k for a hammer because SpaceX can get them at Walmart for $5 a piece.

Which is fine until the toxic outgassing from your $5 Chinese toilet seat poisons the atmosphere over the next month and kills the crew.

Spend the savings on the $20k toilet seats and $30k hammers on installing and lifting an additional carbon filter. I suspect there will still be some money left over.In all seriousness, there is a lot of pork that goes on when the government gets involved that private investors won't stand for.

SpaceX has several flights of dragon and one sat coming later this year. The question becomes does SpaceX have their QA in line to handle these without errors. Likewise, can they launch the dragons on-time (in august and dec)? If they get it on-time, then I have little doubt that they will succeed next year.
Do note that SpaceX is suppose to launch a sat on the F9 in Oct. I would not be surprised to see them carry that through to next year. The reason is that they will have to make sure that sat release is

It would be interesting to see if the human expansion into space eventually ushers in further extension of the extremes of inequality, with the first trillionaires (as measured in today's currency, adjusted for inflation) being, say, asteroid mining tycoons. I don't yet have much of an opinion here; I'm more interested on reading others' thoughts on this.

One of the reasons there hasn't been much commercial interest in space is there's no way to make money. Under no conceivable scenario is it going to be cheaper to mine asteroids and ship back the product than to just mine the stuff here on the earth. You might want to mine asteroids if you want to build something in orbit or at a Lagrange point, but then the question becomes "what are you building that's going to eventually return a profit?"

Under no conceivable scenario is it going to be cheaper to mine asteroids and ship back the product than to just mine the stuff here on the earth.

That's a problem the brain trust at Slashdot can easily fix. So let's make the inconceivable, conceivable.

Step 1: Make a self-replicating factory, say in the 1 ton size range, launch it, and land it on Eros or some other relatively large Earth-crossing asteroid. Note that this is the sole physical Earth-side input to the asteroid in question. I doubt it'd cost more than a few hundred million dollars once we discover mechanical self-replication.

Well, okay. But it's going to be a few hundred years before we have that kind of technology. Everybody was holding their breath last week on a mission that launched from the earth and came within a few meters of the ISS. You're talking about stuff that we couldn't begin to design with our current technology.

Besides, while I can envision robots building a smelter for iron ore and maybe even producing steel girders for construction, it's not so easy to imagine the robot horde is going to have access to t

But it's going to be a few hundred years before we have that kind of technology.

We've had this technology for millennia, though specialized for the Earth environment. Cramming it into a one ton device for use on an extraterrestrial body is a bit of effort, but I don't see the part where we'll need a few centuries.

I think we're probably ten to twenty years out from building a 3D printer for the tabletop that can work on Earth using a somewhat contrived set of raw materials and build copies of itself.

Extremes of inequality as compared to what? We're freaking egalitarian right now compared to most of history -heck, we've nearly eliminated slavery in America, and the poor here (per an article yesterday) have the problem of too many easy sources of electronic entertainment. The long-term trend isn't going the way you seem to think it is...

Imagine what that would be like of a successful and safe flight of Dragon carrying people to and from ISS. SpaceX may even beat a crewed Orion (so far they are ahead in terms of actually flying something). There are many critics saying it cannot be done, but reminds me back in usenet days, someone posted a story of a sci-fi author who noted names and home phone numbers of every journalist that denigrated Apollo program during 1960s. Then while really drunk while Neil and Buzz walked the surface of the moon, and in middle of the night he called these journalists on the phone, yelled, "Ya dumb son-of-a-bitch!" and hung up.

Imagine what that would be like of a successful and safe flight of Dragon carrying people to and from ISS. SpaceX may even beat a crewed Orion (so far they are ahead in terms of actually flying something). There are many critics saying it cannot be done, but reminds me back in usenet days, someone posted a story of a sci-fi author who noted names and home phone numbers of every journalist that denigrated Apollo program during 1960s. Then while really drunk while Neil and Buzz walked the surface of the moon, and in middle of the night he called these journalists on the phone, yelled, "Ya dumb son-of-a-bitch!" and hung up.

Anyone collecting names and phone numbers?

I am pretty sure Neil and Buzz were not drunk while they walked on the moon.

..."Part of Dragon Capsule Returns Safely To Earth."Unfortunately, the back half is jettisoned and burns up. It's a wonderful achievement but it isn't a spaceship. The shuttles were spaceships. Earth doesn't have any at present (unless you count the US Air Force's little robot one).

By this logic, Apollo wasn't a spaceship since the "back half" (a.k.a. Service Module or SM) was jettisoned and burned up prior to re-entry.

You can keep your "spaceship" at $60,000 / kg to LTO. I'm betting on the "non-spaceship", which costs $5,400 / kg to LTO. Read wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for the consequences of demanding full reusability.

I don't think they recovered any of their stages from previous missions, so that would be a first. Recovery is hard, and it's a secondary objective for them. They are very slow on online publicity releases, too. Just look at their website.